Saturday, October 11, 2008

"Solid" Food and "Dead" Rabbits

After mixing one tablespoon of rice cereal with three tablespoons of breastmilk, I'm not quite sure why this is called "solid food." As you can see from the picture of Kevin trying to feed Harry, it's anything but solid. I'm also not ready to call it "food" either since I don't think Harry actually ate any of it, but we finally got to put a bib on him for some purpose besides catching drool, and that in itself probably deserves a blog post. Either way, Harry's first solid food experience was pretty enjoyable.

I've also been enjoying a gray-brown rabbit all summer and fall. It lives somewhere in our backyard, I think, and sometimes when I'm up early in the morning with Harry, I can see it from the dining room or Harry's nursery. Monday afternoon I noticed the rabbit out the west-facing window in Harry's room, sitting up in the grass between our house and the neighbor's. A few hours later, just after Kevin had come home from work, I was changing Harry's diaper and looked out the window, where I saw the rabbit, eyes open, sprawled awkwardly in the grass, and motionless. I watched it for a few minutes while Harry squealed at his mobile, and eventually I called Kevin into the room to confirm my suspicion: "Yeah, it looks dead to me, too."

Out Kevin went, getting a shovel from the garage, into the backyard. I carried Harry to the dining room and watched Kevin dig a hole in the middle of the yard, in the 20-foot circle where the grass doesn't grow quite right because the previous owners of our house had an above-ground pool. He set the last shovelful of dirt off to the side and went around the corner of the house.

I waited, holding Harry to me, sad that the rabbit I had been watching since Harry was born had died. I watched Kevin come back around the house and fill in the hole. Had I missed something? I hadn't seen him come back with the rabbit. Kevin shot an annoyed look my way as he filled in the hole, patting the dirt back down with the shovel, and motioned for me to open the sliding door.

"Why did you make me dig a hole before making sure it was dead?"

Kevin was a little ticked that he'd dug a whole in the lawn for nothing, but I couldn't stop smiling when I heard my rabbit was alive and well, hiding somewhere nearby, but probably now scared to death of the man who approached him with a shovel.